Archive | April 3rd, 2019

NOVANEWS

Tens of thousands gather in Gaza in largely restrained demonstrations, as Palestinians elsewhere mark Land Day.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians demonstrated in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, marking the one-year anniversary of the Great March of Return protest movement that has rocked the besieged enclave.

Gaza’s health ministry reported four deaths from gunfire: a 21-year-old man and three 17-year-old boys. However, a repetition of previous protests, in which as many as 60 people have been killed in one day, was averted.

Adham Amara was shot in the face, Tamer Abu al-Kheir was shot in the chest and Bilal Mahmoud al-Najjar was also shot. They were all 17.

Their deaths mean 52 children have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since the Great March of Return began, according to Save the Children.

Now some 200 Palestinians have been killed overall as Israel has cracked down on protests that have become a weekly occurrence.

‘A void no one can fill’: Gaza’s children face trauma of losing friends, family in protests

Ahead of Saturday’s protest, Palestinian factions called for calm, and around 8,000 members of security were deployed along Gaza’s 65km frontier with Israel to stop protesters from reaching the boundary fence.

The efforts appeared to be largely successful, with the assistance of an Egyptian delegation that has been brokering negotiations with Israel and the Strip’s rulers Hamas.

Both the Egyptians and Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, appeared near the frontier to urge restraint.

Hamas hopes an agreement with Israel can help to ease the blockade that is crippling the deprived coastal enclave.

Khalil al-Hayya, a senior member of Hamas’ politburo, told MEE that the protests can help implement such an agreement.

“Today I salute the people who participated in their thousands in this protest, despite the hunger,” he said on Saturday.

“Tomorrow, the Egyptian delegation is to receive a timeframe for the implementation of the truce understandings. These crowds are the kind of pressure on the Israeli occupation that will make it to commit to its pledges.”

Israeli crackdown

Nizar Abu Amro, a paramedic with the Medical Relief Association NGO, told MEE that Israeli forces were using a new type of gas on the protesters.

“They used nerve gas and another strange kind of tear gas, which is yellow. We do not know anything about its contents, but it causes strange disorders,” he said.

The gas was first seen two days ago in Jabalia in Gaza’s south, and Abu Amro said it is now being tested to determine what it is.

Palestinians protest in Gaza (Reuters)

Several Palestinians described Israeli forces firing on protesters despite being some distance from the frontier.

An MEE correspondent east of Gaza’s al-Burij refugee camp witnessed the military heavily firing tear gas at Palestinians despite them being 300 metres away from the boundary fence.

According to the Gaza health ministry, 244 Palestinians were wounded across the Strip, five of which were in critical condition. A paramedic was among those injured.

‘We do not fear their fire’

A year ago the Great March of Return kicked off calling for Gaza’s 11-year siege to be lifted and for the right of return for Palestinians locked out of their ancestral homes now in Israel.

Speaking to MEE as he toyed with empty tear-gas canisters, Hussein Swedan, 15, said he had every intention of returning to the central Israeli city of Ramla, where his family was expelled from in 1948.

‘They have weapons, tanks, planes and guns that are internationally prohibited. We have our rocks’

– Attallah al-Feeyomi, protester

“I came here to tell the world and the Israeli occupation that I will never forget the land of my fathers and grandfathers. We have a home in Ramla and we will one day return to it,” he told MEE.

“I tell the Israeli occupation that we do not fear their fire.”

In Malaka, east of Gaza City, Iktimaal Hamad told MEE that Palestinian women’s place at the forefront of the protests was crucial.

“The Palestinian woman has brought forth something so precious and valuable for the sake of the Palestinian cause, and will always be on the front lines confronting the challenges, confronting the plots that she is exposed to,” she told MEE.

Nearby was Attallah al-Feeyomi, 19, who was shot in the leg in the same spot during an earlier protest, leading to amputation.

Palestinian citizens of Israel congregated in a Sakhnin hall to listen to speeches by politicians.

“In Sakhnin, in Gaza and the West Bank, the Palestinian people have announced their attachment to its land, to its nation and its shared fate,” Jamal Zahalka, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament and head of the Balad party, told MEE.

Mohammed Baraka, head of the Arab Follow-Up Committee, which represents Palestinian citizens of Israel, used his platform to decry the recent US recognition of Israeli rule over the Syrian Golan Heights.

“It may take time but states of tyranny will fall and states of freedom will rise,” he told the crowd.

“Trump’s declaration granting the Golan to Israel, this declaration will fall because there is no right over our right.”

It had been hoped that as a result of this meeting some progress would be made towards normalising relations between the two countries, with the DPRK agreeing further to reduce the development of its nuclear capacity in return for some relief from the crippling sanctions that have been inflicted upon it by the US imperialist bullies and those who go along with them – either as allies or for fear of sanctions being imposed on them as well.

In the end, however, no agreement whatsoever was reached, despite considerable concessions being offered by the DPRK.

No intent to negotiate

The situation was aptly described by Mike Whitney of Global Research:

“What was particularly puzzling about the summit was the manner in which the negotiations were conducted, that is, there were no negotiations at all, not really. The Trump delegation simply listened politely to Kim’s offers, scratched their chins and then rejected them without debate or counter proposal.

“In other words, the whole summit was a fraud. The US did not come to argue, dicker, quibble, wrangle or haggle on any of the key issues. In their minds, the final verdict was already was set in stone before they ever touched down in Hanoi. It was a done deal. The sanctions would continue to be enforced until the DPRK government collapsed or until hell froze over, whichever came first.

“The media would like readers to believe that the credulous Trump narrowly escaped a lethal trap set by the evil despot, Kim Jong Un. But that’s not what happened at all. What happened is that Kim showed his willingness to go the extra mile for peace but was slapped down by an unreasonable, inflexible and intractable adversary who remains focused laser-like on preserving the status quo, intensifying the sanctions and paving the way to regime change.

“Mr Trump’s offer was essentially the same deal that the United States has pushed – and the north has rejected – for a quarter-century. Intelligence agencies had warned him, publicly, Mr Kim would not be willing to give up the arsenal completely. North Korea itself had said repeatedly that it would only move gradually.” (How Trump-Kim summit failed: big threats, big egos, bad bets by David E Sanger and Edward Wong, New York Times, 2 March 2019)

Decades of crushing Korea’s liberty and independence

Ever since the defeat of the Japanese in World War 2 and their expulsion from the Korean peninsula, US imperialism has made it its business to stifle the Korean people’s desire for liberation from the rule of foreign colonialists and to try to exterminate the communist state that was able to form in the north, in accordance with the wishes of the people, because it was the Soviet Union that oversaw the Japanese withdrawal from the area north of the 38th parallel, rather than US imperialism – which supposedly performed the same role in the south.

The Soviet Union ensured that the northern part of Korea was handed over to the Korean people to run as they saw fit, fully respecting the sovereignty of their country and withdrawing its forces from the country as soon as the handover was complete.

Unlike the Soviet Union, US imperialism has never withdrawn its military machinefrom the south, as its continued presence was required to support the unpopular regime that was installed there under imperialist guidance.

In 1950, US imperialism and its allies, including Britain, and some of its client states launched a ferocious war against north Korea, expecting to be able to overpower it, remove its communist government and replace it with a government of imperialist puppets.

Thanks to the determination of the Korean people to fight to the last to preserve their national sovereignty and independence, and thanks also to the unstinting fraternal support given to them by communist China and the communist Soviet Union, the imperialist plans to annexe north Korea were frustrated, and in 1953 an armistice was declared, bringing an end to the hostilities that had cost 4 million Korean lives.

US imperialism has certainly not been a gracious loser, refusing to countenance a peace treaty with the DPRK, even though 66 years have passed since the end of the war.

Armistice, but no peace treaty; threats and bribes have all failed

Why no peace treaty? “Some analysts said they believed then that the north was seeking an end-of-war declaration as a prelude to legally replacing the armistice that halted the Korean War, an idea that Mr Trump told Mr Kim in Singapore he supported. And Mr Moon [the president of south Korea] was pushing for the end-of-war declaration.

“American officials were worried it could lead too quickly to a peace treaty and then negotiations to draw down the 28,500 American troops on the peninsula – a long-time goal of the north.” (New York Times, ibid)

Obviously, US imperialism is not going to risk losing its base in south Korea, when it’s bad enough not to be able to extend that base north to the Chinese and Russianborders.

Regime after regime in Washington has held firm to the line of demonising and threatening north Korea, seeking to find ways of causing its government’s collapse in order to bring Korean socialism to an end so as to open up the country to plunder by imperialist multinationals, as well as to use as a military base well positioned to counter the rise of China and Russia.

However, despite the hardships the Korean people have had at times to endure as a result of imperialist bullying through economic sanctions and measures to sabotage the country’s trade, they have stood firmly in defence of their country’s sovereignty and the benefits they all enjoy such as guaranteed affordable housing, free education at every level, free nurseries and after-school activities for children, copious free cultural and sporting activities, free healthcare, guaranteed employment, etc – in short, their most precious human dignity.

Over the years there have been attempts by US imperialism to lower the DPRK’s guard. For instance, in 1994, the DPRK was promised light-water reactors in exchange for decommissioning its own nuclear reactors, which were capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium (although their purpose was merely the production of electricity much needed by the country).

The DPRK fulfilled its side of the bargain and, to make up for the lost energy production, it was promised 500,000 tons of heavy fuel free of charge every year until the first light-water reactor was operational. But the light-water reactors never materialised, and heavy oil deliveries were constantly late and insufficient.

It came to light that the regime of President Bill Clinton, which had signed the deal, never intended to implement it. Knowing the losses the country would suffer as a result of the collapse of the socialist governments of the USSR and eastern Europe, the US had been assuming that the collapse of the north Korean government was also imminent. In any event, as soon as George W Bush took over from Clinton, he formally reneged on the deal and refused to implement the undertakings the US had made.

However, as the DPRK has a socialist planned economy, which wastes no human resources through unemployment, underemployment, lack of education and training, or engagement in pointless activity, it was able to mobilise tens of thousands of people to make good the loss of its reactors.

Korea standing firm

With regard to its recent dismantling of the main nuclear power facility at Yongbyon, carried out in good faith at the request of US imperialism so as to facilitate the normalisation of relations and the lifting of sanctions, we can, in the absence of any concrete concessions by the US, expect the facilities that have been destroyed to be restored in very short order. Indeed, that restoration has already begun.

US imperialism cannot claim it was not warned that this would be the result of any intransigence on its part. In his New Year address this year, Kim Jong Un could hardly have expressed himself more clearly:

“I want to believe that our relations with the United States will bear good fruit this year, as inter-Korean relations have made a great turn, by the efforts of the two sides.

“I am of the opinion that, while meeting and holding talks beneficial to both sides with the US president in June last year, we exchanged constructive views and reached a consensus of understanding for a shortcut to removing each other’s apprehensions and resolving the entangled problems.

“I am ready to meet the US president again anytime, and will make strong efforts to obtain results that will be welcomed by the international community.

“But if the United States does not keep the promise it made in the eyes of the world, and if, out of miscalculation of our people’s patience, it attempts unilaterally to enforce something upon us and persists in imposing sanctions and pressure against our republic, we may be compelled to find a new way of defending the sovereignty of our country and the supreme interests of our state, and for achieving peace and stability on the Korean peninsula.”

The New York Times, which admittedly criticises everything Donald Trump does or doesn’t do, nevertheless drew the obvious conclusion from the Hanoi fiasco:

“History suggests that the north Koreans may try to pressure Mr Trump by escalating. And they have the opportunity: Mr Trump not only left Hanoi early, but he also left without any agreement for a ‘freeze’ on continued north Korean production of nuclear material.

Despite US imperialism’s show of bad faith, however, it seems that the DPRK did agree to continue its freeze on the testing of nuclear weapons and on the missiles designed to deliver them pending further discussions. At the same time, US imperialism undertook not to recommence its annual provocative joint military exercises with south Korea – for which south Korea is in any event losing its enthusiasm.

Sanctions targeting the people; a weapon of regime change

Donald Trump initially tried to pin the blame for the failure on the DPRK, claiming that it had demanded the immediate withdrawal of all sanctions. This was blatantly untrue since the DPRK side had clearly recognised that the process of normalisation would need to take place in stages so that trust between the two sides could gradually be built.

The lie, however, had the effect of drawing attention to the reasonableness of what the DPRK had in fact asked for in return for the dismantlement of the Yongbyon base. Namely, that the five most recent rounds of sanctions imposed by the United Nations since March 2016 should be lifted.

“They also banned energy sales to north Korea. Altogether, they held back billions of dollars of trade, a senior state department official said.”

But of course, true to form: “The far-reaching nature of the sanctions – and the suffering they were causing – were exactly why hardline administration officials wanted to keep them up,” for these were the sanctions most pertinent to the US’s regime change agenda.

Mike Whitney speculated that Kim Jong Un knew perfectly well that US imperialism would not make the slightest concession, and that he was safe in making a spectacular denuclearisation offer, far more generous than anybody had any right to expect, because he knew that whatever he offered would be turned down, adding: “After Hanoi, I would expect Russia and China will look for ways circumvent the sanctions.” (Global Research, op cit)

In fact, both China and Russia are being themselves bullied by US imperialism, not only through the virulent propaganda levied against them but also in concrete ways – Russia being subjected to sanctions and China to punitive tariffs on its exports to the US.

Kim Jong Un’s request to remove sanctions that aim to cause suffering to the general population cannot but resonate with them, and with all countries that are similarly subjected to imperialist bullying.

In fact, as more and more countries are subjected to this treatment, it will in all probability hasten the development of measures to break the US imperialist financial monopoly that makes its sanctions weapon so destructive. That in turn would cause the purchasing power of the dollar to plummet spectacularly and permanently. US imperialism will end up simply shooting itself in the foot.

Growing accord between north and south: an own-goal for US policy

US imperialism’s ‘pivot to Asia’ – ie, its policy of extending its domination throughout Asia – is coming up against more and more resistance. South Korea has traditionally been its firmest foothold in the region, but that foothold is beginning to slip.

Lacking totally in diplomatic finesse, Trump was only last year blurting out that if the DPRK did not do as it was told and abandon all its nuclear capacity, it would be subjected to “fire and fury” such as had “never been seen”.

This threat had not the slightest effect on the DPRK, which dismissed the remarks as the ravings of a lunatic, but it terrified the south Koreans, who could not but see the obvious: that any US military attack on the north would inevitably rebound on the south, pulling it into a terrible war, and possibly rendering it uninhabitable for decades as a result of the deployment of nuclear weapons.

To the extent that the DPRK’s nuclear bombs and missile delivery systems actually deter any military attack against the country, they act to protect not only the north, but also the south. This realisation has given great impetus to those within south Korea who seek detente with the north: a peace treaty, the departure of the US troops stationed in their country, and reunification with the north.

South Korean president Moon Jae-in has been working hard to improve relations with the DPRK. Indeed, he was elected by a population the majority of whom would like to have friendly relations with the north, not only to enhance their own security, but also to facilitate the building of a strong, sovereign, wealthy and independent Korea – a goal which they share with the government and all the people of the north.

This is why last September, “In a formal agreement known as the Pyongyang Declaration, the two leaders committed to reconnect rail and road links between the two countries, reopen a frozen joint industrial zone in Kaesong and a tourist site at Mount Kumgang, and make plans for a special economic zone, of the kind Deng promoted to open up China to foreign investment in the 1980s.” (Kim Jong Un has a dream. The US should help him realise it by John Delury, New York Times, 21 September 2018)

Mike Whitney commented: “The economic integration plans are moving forward even before the nuclear issue has been resolved, the sanctions have been lifted, or a formal treaty ending the war has been signed. The entire region appears to be breaking out of Washington’s orbit and charting a new course on its own.

“Naturally, this has ruffled a few feathers at the White House, where Trump’s advisers have concocted various means of derailing the project. Sabotaging the summit in Hanoi is just the first volley in this new confrontation; there are bound to be many more in the days to come.” (Global Research, op cit)

Division in the enemy camp

It is interesting to note, however, that Donald Trump may be at odds in this regard with his ultra-hawkish advisers Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton. It is not beyond all possibility that he would have liked to have responded to Kim Jong Un’s overtures with some small concessions but was somehow dissuaded from doing so, since by all accounts he had been confident that progress would be made at the Hanoi summit.

Trump prides himself on being a ‘great negotiator’, but at Hanoi no negotiation took place. Negotiation requires each side to make a sacrifice in order to obtain some superior gain, yet the US side was prepared to sacrifice nothing. In the circumstances, one would have thought even Donald Trump would have considered it a complete waste of time travelling all that way.

Support for this supposition comes from the fact that Trump was careful to leave the door open for future negotiations. And recently he has vetoed the application of yet further sanctions on the DPRK:

“President Trump undercut his own treasury department on Friday [22 March 2019] with a sudden announcement that he had rolled back newly imposed north korea sanctions, appearing to overrule national security experts as a favour to Kim Jong Un, the north Korean leader.

Is it possible that Trump can see more clearly than such ‘respectable’ hawks as Bolton, Pompeo and Pence that US imperialism is in danger of losing all influence in the far east if it continues with its policy of boorish intransigence? It is clear that the Trump regime and US imperialism are in complete disarray on the question of how to deal with the DPRK.

Time to sign a peace treaty to end the Korean war; Korea is one!

Posted in USA, North KoreaComments Off on Why the US-DPRK summit meeting in Hanoi failed

The National Bureau for Defending Land and Resisting Settlements said in its latest weekly report that the successive Israeli governments continue to confiscate more and more Palestinian lands through displacing their owners, uprooting their trees, and destroying their homes, amid Netanyahu’s pledges to settler leaders to intensify settlement activities and strength the protection of settlers, particularly in occupied Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley and areas south of Hebron so as to win upcoming Knesset elections, based on the US administration that violates the international law and the resolutions of international legitimacy, which prohibits the control of others land by force.

The US President, Trump’s atrocities in recognizing of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the transfer of his embassy to Jerusalem, and then the signing of a presidential decree that recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Syrian Golan since 1967, at the White House in the presence of Israeli PM, Netanyahu, are live examples.

Netanyahu, who came back from the U.S carrying a precious gift to the Israelis ahead of the Knesset elections, boasting of the recognition decree signed by the US President on Israel sovereignty of the occupied Golan, telling Head of Council of settlements in the Golan: “here is the decree signed by President Trump. Here is the American recognition of our sovereignty over the Golan. We have waited 50 years. It is a great declaration that greatly strengthens our sovereignty over the Golan.” This declaration represents a preemptive basis for future recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the occupied West Bank. In his address to the Israeli lobby conference on March 26, 2019, the American Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, called for using the term “Judea and Samaria” instead of the occupied West Bank, and said that Israel must retain security control in the West Bank with a permanent security presence along the Jordan River, which is considered as American call to annex the occupied West Bank.

According to the former US ambassador to Israel and US envoy to the negotiations for peace between Palestinians and Israel, Martin Indyk, who commented on Twitter on Tuesday morning, 26 March 2019, saying Trump s recognition of Israel’s sovereignty on the occupied Golan, that “it will not be long before the West Bank is included in this way,” which is a matter of great concern among the public opinion in the US capital that Trump would do the same if the Israel decides to annex the entire West Bank´-or-parts of it.

On the other hand, according to the latest report issued by the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics on the occasion of the 43rd anniversary of the Land Day, which the Palestinian people mark it in all places of residency, the Israeli occupation -dir-ectly exploits about 2,642 thousand dunums in Area C, which constitutes 76.3% of the total area of Area C, which is 3,375 thousand dunums. The report pointed out that the number of colonial sites and military bases in Israel at the end of 2017 in the West Bank was 435 sites, including 150 colonies and 116 colonial outposts, and that the year 2018 witnessed a significant increase in the pace of construction and expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank where the Israeli occupation constructed about 9,384 new colonial units, as well as the establishment of 9 new outposts. In addition, the area of influence in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank amounted to 541.5km2 by the end of 2018, representing about 9.6% of the West Bank, while the confiscated areas for military purposes is about 18% of the West Bank, besides the annexation and expansion wall, which isolates more than 12% of the West Bank.

Israeli Jewish website disclosed affiliated to settlers disclosed that PM Netanyahu had agreed to build 5,000 settlement units in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. According to the website that received a document by the Assistant Secretary for Settlement Affairs in the West Bank showed that the political level approved under Netanyahu s presidency a number of plans for the construction of 5,000 settlement units. The document, which the site said is an electoral plan for Netanyahu, showed that 1,000 settlement units will be built in Beitar Ilit, 1,000 in Efrat, 73 in Ariel, 263 in Karnei Shomron, 750 in Maaleh Adumim, 323 in Kfar Adumim, 167 in Givat Ze ev. The sources confirmed that the General Planning and Building Committee will meet to approve the plan to promote the construction of 4500 settlement units at the end this week i.e. few days before the elections.

As for the ongoing settlement plans, Israeli Minister of Economy and Industry, Eli Cohen announced the decision to confiscate new Palestinian lands to expand the industrial area of Mishor Adumim in the settlement of Ma aleh Adumim with 500 dunums. According to Cohen, this expansion in the industrial zone will benefit the Israeli economy not only at the local level, but also internationally. Moreover, Cohen opened a large commercial and leisure complex with an investment of NIS 400 million and 85% of settlers support imposing Israeli sovereignty over the occupied West Bank.

In Jerusalem, the High Court also rejected the petition filed by the Darwish family, which demanded the cancellation of the confiscation of the family land, near which the Gilo settlement south of occupied Jerusalem was built. The total land area is 242 dunums, of which 14.5 dunums is the area on which the family house was built. Attempts to control the land started 2 years ago. It was revealed that the settlement “Alad” and the Israeli “Antiquities Authority” are working to open a hole under the walls of old Jerusalem in order to facilitate the entry of settlers to the so-called “City of David” in the Silwan town towards the “archaeological park” near the Al-Buraq Wall. The work started by dismantling part of the building of the Islamic archaeological site dated back to the Umayyad era. The project comes within the context of a large tourism project that carried out by the “Elad” Association.

Al Skeilbiyyeh – on the 23rd March 2019 I entered the Syrian Christian town of Al Skeilbiyyeh. Between 4 and 5pm, at least four villages to the west of the town were attacked by Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS) forces embedded to the north of the villages. HTS is a poorly disguised rebrand of Al Qaeda or Nusra Front in Syria and now controls the majority of Idleb province and terrorist-held areas of Northern Hama bordering Al Skeilbiyyeh.

One of the child victims of the suspected chemical attack in Northern Hama, arriving at Al Skeilbiyyeh hospital. (Photo: local photographer)

The villages of al-Rasif, al-Aziziyyeh, al-Khandaq and al-Jayyid were hit by an estimated 5 mortars. 34 victims of a suspected chemical attack were brought to Al Skeilbiyyeh hospital after being treated at the scene of the attack. I spoke to pediatrician, Dr Modhesh Farha who informed me that three children were among the victims, one of whom was severely affected with breathing difficulties. By the time I arrived at the hospital at around 11pm, two of the children had been released back to their families.

One of the victims suffering with breathing difficulty – Sajiaa Abu Kahla, from the village of al-Khandaq (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

Medical staff and doctors told me that victims were washed at the scene of the attack before being brought to the hospital where doctors had administered oxygen, saline drips, antibiotics in some cases, and cortisone (steroids) for the shock. Symptoms described to me included – respiratory problems, sinus problems, skin blisters, damage to the cornea of the eyes and nausea. While I was speaking with doctors in front of one patient, she went into what appeared to be a toxic shock reaction (also confirmed by the doctor). The following video shows this moment – warning, it is distressing:

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I spoke with some of the victims who were already starting to recover. They described the attack taking place between 4 and 5pm. They are used to regular mortar attacks from the extremist groups embedded in the surrounding countryside but this was the first time they had experienced what appears to have been a chemical attack. The nephew of one victim, Sajiaa Abu Kahla, from the village of al-Khandaq (see photo above), described his aunt struggling to breathe after inhaling the white “smoke” that was seen after the attack, he told me:

“Smoke, white smoke, its color was white, it covered the land, this was in the village of al-Rasif”.

Another victim I spoke to, Nawfal Tawbar, described the same white smoke that hovered about one meter above the ground and was very thick and static. He told me that he had also had difficulty breathing, he reported a stinging in his sinuses. Tawbar also reported a strong smell of bleach from the smoke. This testimony was repeated almost without variation by all victims I manged to interview despite the chaos in the hospital as ambulances brought more patients for treatment. Tawbar’s interview is here:

We were told at the hospital that a Syrian/Russian team had been immediately despatched to collect soil samples etc and to ensure the area was safe for residents to return to once they had recovered sufficiently. HTS were being held responsible for the attack. To date, I am unaware if the OPCW has been mobilised to investigate this event. Previously, on 24th November 2018, so-called “moderate rebels” appeared to use chemical weapons in an attack on districts of western Aleppo, the OPCW has not produced a final report on this attack so far, despite having deployedthe Fact Finding Mission (FFM) in December 2018 and January 2019.

As far as I am aware no colonial media outlet reported on this suspected chemical attack. A quick google search reveals two reports by SouthFront and AlMasdar News and local news agencies. There were no White Helmet theatrics to attract western media, no opportunity to further criminalise the Syrian government and its allies. The wrong kind of Syrians were affected by this attack – the villages and towns in this region are steadfast in their resistance against the U.S coalition campaign to destabilise Syria and to topple the Syrian government – their voices, their suffering does not serve the agenda of the NATO-aligned media.

Ongoing terrorist attacks

The towns of Al Skeilbiyyeh and Mhardeh, about 3o minutes apart, have been under sustained attack by the HTS-controlled extremist armed groups over the last few weeks. Despite a Russian/Turkish brokered ceasefire, the armed groups have systematically been targeting civilian and residential areas in both towns. In Mhardeh, the electrical power station is constantly under attack which has a detrimental effect on the whole country as it supplies electricity to an extensive area of Syria, including Damascus.

I had previously visited Al Skeilbiyyeh shortly after a particularly destructive series of attacks. Commander of the local, volunteer National Defence Forces, Nabel Alabdalla, told me that he believed the “rebels” were using a new, more destructive form of C4 explosive that was capable of causing much more widespread damage to entire neighbourhoods. Al Skeilbiyyeh had received more than 25 rockets/mortars over a three week period, invariably targeting schools, civilian homes and busy markets. Watch my full interview with Nabel just a few days after one of the attacks:

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On September 7th 2018, the same armed groups supplied and promoted by the U.S coalition, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia had targeted Mhardeh with ground-launched cluster munitions. Two days later, the same munitions were used to target Al Skeilbiyyeh causing considerable damage to infrastructure but thankfully not claiming any lives.

In Mhardeh, 13 civilians were murdered in this attack, some dying later in hospital from the awful wounds they had sustained. Shadi Yousef Shehda lost his three children, his wife and his mother in the Mhardeh massacre. I met with Shadi over Christmas 2018 when he told me that he would never leave the “city of the sun”, Mhardeh, despite his unimaginable grief and loss.

Amnesty International says the Syrian government, with Russian support, is ramping up attacks on schools, hospitals and first responders in Idlib. https://www.thedailybeast.com/syrian-government-forces-backed-by-russia-hit-civilians-kids-in-strikes-report?ref=home …

Again, these attacks barely register in western media while the hysteria over retaliatory attacks by the Syrian Arab Army and allies is commonplace. Without these defensive measures by the SAA and Russia who knows how many more civilians would have lost their lives by now in the towns bordering terrorist-held northern Hama and Idleb. This threat to besieged Syrian towns appears to be of no consequence to media in the West.

One of the ground launched cluster munition rockets that targeted Al Skeilbiyyeh in September 2018. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

As one National Defence Forces soldier says in this video…. “the terrorists are cowards” – they will never face the soldiers of Al Skeilbiyyeh on the battlefield, they prefer to kill or maim the elderly, children, pregnant women – on 16th March 2019 three children were injured during one attack, one child later died from their wounds. Ayat Mahmoud, a young Palestinian woman from Damascus living in Al Skeilbiyyeh was also killed in this attack. She was pregnant, her child was due in one week. What did these children or an unborn child do that they should be targeted by western-sponsored terrorism in their own homes.

This shameful aspect of this externally fomented war is hidden from view by The Guardian, the BBC, CNN and Channel 4 and others, it is unreported and disappeared just as many of the terrorist atrocities have been conveniently ignored throughout the 8 year war that has been waged against the Syrian people.

The UK Foreign Office (UK FCO) has poured £ 2.8 billion into “humanitarian aid” for Syria. Aid that is supplied predominantly into areas controlled by HTS, including Idleb. On the 27th March 2019, Ambassador Jonathan Allen, UK Deputy Permanent Representative to UN, made a statement at the Security Council Briefing on Syria during which he proudly confirmed the expenditure of taxpayers money that has serious potential to be financing terrorism in Syria (emphasis added):

At the Brussels Conference, the United Kingdom pledged £400 million – or $530 million. And indeed we have mobilised over £2.81 billion to the Syrian Crisis since 2012 – that’s over £3.7 billion. That’s our largest ever response.

Allen makes no mention of the armed group attacks on the Syrian Christian communities in the region. Nor does he mention that the UK FCO intelligence asset, the White Helmets, are embedded with the armed groups (including HTS) in Madiq Citadel just 500m from the outskirts of Al Skeilbiyyeh town.

No reports have been issued by the White Helmets condemning the targeting of children and civilian areas by the armed groups, or the use of prohibited weapons including potential chemical weapons last weekend – meanwhile the UK FCO continues to claim that a primary role of the White Helmets is to document “war crimes”. Apparently the White Helmets only report on alleged “war crimes” committed by the Syrian government, army or allies that coroborrate an aggressive UK FCO interventionist policy, and not on the daily crimes committed by the extremist armed groups against defenceless civilians.

What enables these besieged towns to keep resisting and to weather the storm that has threatened them for more than 6 years since the armed groups consolidated in Northern Hama and Idleb?

According to Nabel Alabdalla, it is the steadfastness of the ordinary people, their refusal to abandon their land and their country. It is the belief in the “way of the martyr“, the ultimate sacrifice for their mother, Syria. The soldiers I have spoken to across Syria and their families genuinely believe that the greatest honour bestowed by God is that of dying for their country, dying to defend their families, their people and their way of life.

One of the volunteer NDF soldiers in Al Skeilbiyyeh. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

This belief in solidarity, unity, resistance and ultimate victory for the righteous forms the backbone of the fighting forces that have defended Syria for eight arduous and devastating years.

View from the Assumption of the Virgin Mary monastery that has been targeted many times by the terrorist groups less than 500m away. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

The morning after the suspected chemical attack we all gathered at the church in Al Skeilbiyyeh. The chaos of the previous night was still fresh in our memories, soldiers had been deployed to guard the hospital in case HTS decided to target it. This was a new day. The day of blessing the newly rebuilt bell-tower that had been destroyed in a previous terrorist attack, a project personally undertaken by Nabel Alabdalla.

The bell had been gifted to Al Skeilbiyyeh by the Russian Orthodox church almost 200 years ago. The church had been built around the bell. Now history came full circle as the bell was restored to its rightful place and a service was held to celebrate this momentous demonstration of resistance and to honour the martyrs whose bloodshed and sacrifice has made such events possible.

The service in the simple church was a moving and powerful recognition of the “way of the martyr”, tears were shed quietly by the families, mothers and wives of the soldiers who have given their lives to protect their loved ones. As I witnessed the sharing and outpouring of grief and pride, I began to fully comprehend why this town will never kneel to hatred and violent extremism.

In front of me sat an elderly lady almost bent double, perhaps with arthritis. She wore the traditional headdress of Al Skeilbiyyeh. During the service, despite her physical discomfort, she rose when required and prostrated herself on the floor to pray. Her unwavering belief in prayer and the power of the protection of the Virgin Mary seemed to sustain her throughout the hour long service.

In front of her sat another elderly lady, her hair pulled back in a silver twist. She sat next to a young child wearing a black bow in her hair. Both were transfixed by the ceremony, old and young absorbed in the making of history and the dreams of a future without war.

During the service in Al Skeilbiyyeh church. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

After the service, we all entered the courtyard to witness the blessing of the bell-tower and to hear the bells being rung by the sons of martyrs, the honoured few who are given this privilege. The town’s brass band accompanied the bell-ringers filling the air with the sound of music that echoed across the valley towards the gatherings of armed groups, defying them to attack on this glorious Sunday morning.

The guns and mortars were silenced. Despite all the threats and the impotent extremist rage, the people of this town still stand proud and strong – “carrying the candles of peace and love in one hand and with the other hand on the trigger of the gun” as Nabel Alabdalla has often said.

The following video is a compilation of the bell-ringing. The passion demonstrated by the bell-ringers is indicative of the love these people have for their history, their culture, their town and their country. This is why this war will be won by Syrians (and allies) defending Syria and why the U.S Coalition of terror will never be victorious, there is no place in this secular society for ideological extremism and tyranny.

NOVANEWS

The BDS committee was formed in 2005 and has the support of more than 170 organisations in Palestine. (AFP)

The University of Cape Town has the chance to take a position in support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and I join academics around the world in hoping that the ethically obligatory and politically progressive decision will be made to express support and to bind the university to its principles.

That should not be very difficult, since BDS draws on longstanding traditions, some of which were importantly developed in the context of the struggle against apartheid, for refusing modes of co-operation and economic consumption that seek to normalise relations with a state and its institutions structured on a model of settler colonialism and its modes of subjugating the Palestinian people inside and outside the current boundaries of that state.

The point is not merely to refuse to buy Israeli goods and so to support that economy that is, after all, a war economy (though that is one important point).Neither is the point only to call on governments to impose sanctions on Israel until it ceases its illegal occupation and its crimes against humanity (although that is an imperative point).

Rather, the point is to make clear that any co-operative relationship with an Israeli institution is not possible until or unless that institution takes a strong public position against the occupation; the discrimination against Israeli Palestinians; and supports the right of return for Palestinians in exile.

One objection to BDS, or commonly articulated anxiety, takes the following form: “But surely the Jews are in an exceptional historical circumstance, given the history of anti-Semitism, the Nazi genocide against the Jews, and continuing threats of anti-Semitism”. The response to this, it seems to me, has to be very clear. The opposition to anti-Semitism, as with all racisms, is ethically imperative. Second, the Israeli state does not represent the views of the Jewish people, even though it claims to do precisely that.

BDS is a movement that opposes all racisms, including anti-semitism. It is certainly not anti-semitic to oppose racism. On the contrary, to oppose racism is one of the most important contributions of Jewish activists against apartheid, against segregation and all forms of racism now widely directed against migrants. Let us not forget the large numbers of Jews who have fought in social justice struggles, including the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa (Joe Slovo, Arthur Goldreich, Ruth First, Albie Sachs, Helen Suzman), who contest the radical inequalities that form the basis of Israel’s claim of Jewish sovereignty and its claim to maintain Jewish demographic advantage at all costs.

If to be for BDS is to be for social justice, it would, in fact, be anti-semitic to claim that Jews do not struggle for social justice. Not only are there many Jews who are actively struggling for BDS, but they are struggling in solidarity with Palestinians, on behalf of migrants and Mizrachim within Israel, in the ongoing struggle for racial equality and against racist violence in the United States, opposing fascist politics of the borders in Europe, enacting precisely those principles of working together across those kinds of cultural differences that characterise true democratic struggle.

BDS emerges as a social movement precisely when existing legal authorities fail to oppose manifestly unjust forms of discrimination. In this sense, it is a popular social justice movement that seeks to enforce norms of justice precisely when existing legal structures fail. Boycotts that focus on institutions tend to think that institutions, rather than individuals, have the power to appeal to the state, to withdraw their tacit support from state operations, including military ones.

So the boycott does not mean that its supporters fail to work with Israelis — there is now, after all, a “Boycott me” movement within Israel. It does not mean that Israelis are not hired for positions or are not invited to conferences. On the contrary, it means that working with Israelis is fine as long as one is not working with their institutions, lending credibility to those academic, economic, or cultural institutions that have refused to oppose the occupation in clear and consistent ways.

The BDS committee was formed in 2005 and has the support of more than 170 organisations in Palestine. It does not stipulate the right way to impose boycotts and sanctions, but it does describe its politics as “anti-normalisation”, which seek to force a wide range of political institutions and states to stop compliance with the occupation. This is the largest, most dynamic nonviolent mode of politically resisting the occupation.

We, who live on the outside and have no claim to the region (including those of us who are Jewish and have renounced any such claim), miss something fundamental about the importance of this movement if we fail to understand that it is nascent and a promising enactment of Palestinian self-determination.

If we want to know what we can do from the outside to support Palestinian self-determination, then we can support BDS, which alone can put international pressure on Israel to conform to basic principles of democracy for the first time. Although radical changes within Israeli civil society are quite important — and progressive Israelis are working on that in many admirable ways — those changes cannot substitute for the need to establish Palestinian self-determination against a continuing, anachronistic and brutal colonial regime.

If we on the outside are asked to join, then that is our way of not only supporting the claim that Palestinian self-determination has been systematically foreclosed and denied, but that, at this historical moment, BDS is the form taken by the movement of nonviolent Palestinian self-determination.

By supporting the BDS movement, you honour the history of the struggle against apartheid and all movements against colonial subjugation and racial supremacy, but you also vote for the political practice of nonviolence and for the future promise of democracy and political self-determination.

Bethlehem, occupied West Bank – Frantic clamouring disrupts the usual noises at Israel’s Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem, where thousands of Palestinian workers queue for hours, starting at 3am, to make it on time for their jobs in Israel.

“He has fainted. Everyone move! Call an ambulance!” The crowd becomes louder as a young man is carried outside the checkpoint. Numerous workers surround the man’s limp body stretched out on the ground, and others attempt to resuscitate him – to no avail.

Several of the bystanders shout: “Move, move! Make room! Let the journalist film! Show the world what is happening to us”, as they push people aside to create a cleared space for Al Jazeera to photograph the scene.

An ambulance arrives, and the young man is lifted onto a gurney and rushed to the hospital. The workers continue on through the single cement lane, sipping on small paper cups of coffee to push past their exhaustion. One worker looks at Al Jazeera and says: “Israel treats animals better than us.”

It’s a typical morning at Checkpoint 300.

Suffocation, broken ribs and death

Palestinians have long complained of the volatile conditions at the checkpoint – also referred to as the Gilo checkpoint. However, Palestinian workers tell Al Jazeera that the conditions at the crossing have worsened over the last two months.

The checkpoint was built more than a decade ago as part of Israel’s separation wall, deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2004. EAPPI, an organisation that monitors Israel’s checkpoints, tells Al Jazeera that 300 is “the worst (checkpoint) in the West Bank”.

Thousands of Palestinians from the southern occupied West Bank must cross this barrier to work in occupied East Jerusalem – part of the occupied Palestinian territory – or Israel. It can take up to three hours to cross the checkpoint during the rush hour. When traffic is less during the day, the journey takes just a few minutes.

Many Palestinians are escaping high unemployment rates in the occupied West Bank, while others prefer to work in Israel for the better wages – at times receiving more than double than what they would make in the West Bank.

The scene each morning is chaotic, with Palestinians squeezed together inside a single lane, and pulling themselves up on the surrounding steel bars, climbing over, and dangling among the crowd.

When Israeli officials unlock the turnstile at the entrance of the checkpoint, Palestinians push forward, passing one by one, until it is locked once again. Those who make it through then enter a warehouse-like compound where they meet more turnstiles, a security conveyor belt – where they must place all of their items – and a metal detector.

Finally, they arrive at the permit check, where Israeli officials verify work permits and take their fingerprints.

Abed Abu Shiera, who has sold coffee outside the checkpoint for 11 years, has seen first-hand the effects of the barrier’s harsh conditions. Every morning, at least one or two workers suffocate and faint from the lack of airflow, he says. Abu Shiera himself often has to call the ambulance to collect them.

The 44-year-old has witnessed legs being broken after Palestinians fall off the steel bars where dozens of workers hang from. Other times, he has seen workers get their ribs broken from the pressure of the crowd pushing forward each time the turnstile is unlocked.

Abu Shiera has even witnessed death. In October, a 65-year-old worker from Arroub refugee camp in the southern Hebron district reportedly slipped and fell on his head inside the narrow corridor of the checkpoint. He was rushed to a nearby hospital and pronounced dead.

Despite this daily reality, Abu Shiera echoed the voices of many workers Al Jazeera spoke with: “I have come here six days a week for 11 years,” he said. “But this past month and a half is the worst period I have ever seen.”

‘It gets worse and worse’

Palestinian workers tell Al Jazeera that before a few months, the large crowds would thin out by 7am. However, during Al Jazeera’s visit this week, even at 8am, the checkpoint was still crammed with people.

Amir, a 23-year-old Palestinian who has worked as a cleaner at the checkpoint for a private Israeli company for some five years, says that Israeli officials used to typically lock the turnstiles for five- to 15-minute intervals, before letting more Palestinians pass.

For the past two months, however, Israeli officials have locked the turnstiles for up to one hour, Amir says, causing the already intolerable conditions at the checkpoint to exacerbate. Palestinians are now fainting more frequently, and some workers expressed fear of being crushed in the crowd.

Nasser Abu Maria, a 45-year-old construction worker from Beit Ummar in Hebron, stands to the side with a few dozen other Palestinians, waiting for the crowd to disperse before daring to enter the checkpoint.

Abed Abu Shiera has sold coffee outside the checkpoint for 11 years [Jaclynn Ashly/Al Jazeera]

A week and a half ago, Abu Maria suffocated and fainted inside the checkpoint. The lane was too crowded for workers to carry him outside, forcing them to hurl his listless body over the steel bars, where workers on the other side grabbed him and settled him on the ground.

He was then rushed to a hospital. “I am too scared to enter the checkpoint when it’s like this,” he said, gesturing to the sea of workers crammed and stacked on top of each other in between the cement and steel.

“All we want is for them (Israelis) to just stop locking the gate. Just let us pass. That’s all we ask. Stop putting us through all this humiliation,” he said. “The exhaustion I experience going through this checkpoint is more tiring than my eight-hour workday.”

Last week, frustrations at the checkpoint reached a boiling point, as Israeli officials locked the turnstiles for long durations throughout the morning hours. Abu Shiera tells Al Jazeera that out of frustration workers broke one of the turnstiles and a gate inside the checkpoint in order to rush through.

Abu Shiera says that the workers were suffocating, but an Israeli border police spokesperson claims the workers were “acting violently, shoving, pushing and breaking things”.

Ibrahim Hushiyye, construction worker [Jaclynn Ashly/Al Jazeera]

Israeli officials gathered the workers into an open yard inside the compound until they could fix the damage.

“This checkpoint has always been difficult,” Ibrahim Hushiyye, a 28-year-old construction worker from the town of Yatta in Hebron, told Al Jazeera. “But it used to be easier than these days.”

“Every day it gets worse and worse,” he said. “It’s far beyond just being intolerable. If someone has never experienced something like this, then I hope they never have to.”

‘We are humans’

The Israeli border police spokesperson confirmed that the Israeli army is expanding the area of the checkpoint, creating more lanes, and introducing technological upgrades in order to lessen traffic, similar to the recent developments at Israel’s Qalandiya checkpoint near Ramallah.

The exhaustion I experience going through this checkpoint is more tiring than my eight-hour workday.

NASSER ABU MARIA, PALESTINIAN CONSTRUCTION WORKER

However, he denied that this was the cause of the heavy traffic, instead telling Al Jazeera that it was the result of an increase of permits Israel has been issuing for Palestinians to work in Israel. Yet Abu Shiera says he has not seen any increase in the number of workers, and the main issue is the Israeli officials locking the turnstiles.

When asked by Al Jazeera if Israeli authorities were aware of the difficult conditions Palestinians are facing at the checkpoint, the spokesperson took a long pause, and said: “Yes.” But went on to say these issues are relegated to “the Palestinian side [of the checkpoint], not the Israeli side”, and said it was the responsibility of Palestinian authorities to address these issues.

Palestinians have long complained of the conditions at the checkpoint [Jaclynn Ashly/Al Jazeera]

A source at the Palestinian District Coordination Office, which coordinates with the Israeli army, spoke to Al Jazeera on the condition of anonymity and said that the entire area of the checkpoint is Israeli-controlled. “We have no decision-making power with the Israelis. They don’t consult with us at all. We have no control over the Israeli checkpoints,” he said.

Even if the Israelis were to request Palestinian assistance at the checkpoint, however, the Palestinian side would refuse. “We won’t allow them to put us in front of the workers. Then the workers will fight us instead of the Israelis.”

“We don’t interfere at all,” he added. “The problem is the checkpoint itself and this is caused by the Israelis.”

The Israeli border police spokesperson assured Al Jazeera that a new, upgraded checkpoint would be open in the coming months and would solve the issue of traffic.

Palestinian workers, meanwhile, say that the Israeli army has been renovating a new portion of the checkpoint for at least a year and a half, and each time a date is set for its opening, it gets postponed.

“We are always told that the checkpoint is being renovated and it will get better. But I don’t think Israel is interested in making our lives any easier,” Abu Maria said.

“All of this is completely unnecessary,” he continued. “We pass through this checkpoint almost every day. They (Israeli officials) know us. We are carrying our lunch bags, not weapons. We are just trying to make it to work on time.

NOVANEWS

Racist graffiti on the walls of Beit Hanina, East Jerusalem. (Photo: via Social Media)

Jewish settlers punctured the tires of several Palestinian-owned vehicles and sprayed anti-Arab graffiti on walls and vehicles in the Beit Hanina neighborhood, in occupied East Jerusalem, on Monday.

Eyewitnesses told Ma’an that a group of Jewish settlers broke the windows of a number of Palestinian-owned vehicles and spray-painted anti-Arab slogans on them, in addition to racist graffiti on the walls of the neighborhood.

Better known as “price tag” attacks, extremist Jewish settlers use violent acts on Palestinians and their property to demonstrate their opposition to Israeli restrictions on settlements and their outposts in the occupied West Bank.

NOVANEWS

A four year old Palestinian child, died yesterday after being targeted and shot in the head by Nazi Gestapo Sniper.

Robert Inlakesh

Four year old, Ahmed Abu Abed, was targeted and shot in the eye by Nazi Sniper last Friday. According to eye witness testimonies, Ahmed Abu Abed was more than 100 meters away from the fence in Gaza, during the Khan Yunis (Southern Gaza) demonstrations where he was shot.

NOVANEWS

As most are surely aware, the last year or two has seen a growing crackdown on free speech and free thought across the Internet, with our constitutionally-protected First Amendment rights being circumvented through the agency of monopolistic private sector corporations such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Although as yet our government has not gained the power to ban discordant views nor punish their advocates, anonymous tech company censors regularly take these steps, seemingly based upon entirely opaque and arbitrary standards which lack any power of appeal. No one really knows why some individuals are banned or “de-platformed” and others are not, and surely this looming uncertainty has imposed self-censorship upon hundreds of individuals for every publicized victim who receives an exemplary punishment.

Some critics have attacked this policy as a new form of “McCarthyism,” but this characterization seems based upon historical ignorance. Although the notorious junior senator from Wisconsin was an alcoholic prone to making reckless, unsubstantiated charges and therefore served as an extremely poor vessel for the movement he eventually came to symbolize, his accusations of massive Communist political subversion were absolutely correct and indeed somewhat understated. Over the last quarter-century, the public release of the Venona Decrypts has demonstrated that throughout most of the Franklin Roosevelt Administration and even afterward, the top levels of our national government were honeycombed with numerous spies and traitors deeply loyal to the Soviet Union rather than the United States. Today’s ritualistic denunciations of McCarthyism are made by ignorant journalists who derive their understanding of the past from misleading Hollywood dramas rather than the meticulously researched volumes produced by leading academic scholars such as John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr.

In fact, just a few years before Sen. McCarthy burst upon the national scene, control of our federal government was nearly seized by agents of Stalin. From 1941 to 1944 FDR’s Vice President was Henry Wallace, who would have succeeded to the presidency if Roosevelt had renominated him in that latter year or had died prior to early 1945. And although Wallace himself was not disloyal, his top advisors were mostly Communist agents. Indeed, he later stated that a Wallace Administration would have included Laurence Duggan as Secretary of State and Harry Dexter White as Secretary of the Treasury, thereby installing Stalinist henchmen at the top of the Cabinet, presumably supported by numerous lower-level officials of a similar political ilk. One might jokingly speculate whether the Rosenbergs—later executed for treason—would have been placed in charge of our nuclear weapons development program.

That America’s national government of the early 1940s actually came came within a hair’s breadth—or rather a heart-beat—of falling under Communist control is a very uncomfortable truth. And our history books and popular media have maintained such total silence about this remarkable episode that even among today’s well-educated Americans I suspect that fewer than five in one hundred are aware of this grim reality. Surely this should cause all sensible people to become quite cautious about blithely accepting the standard narrative of other important historical events promoted by those same sources of obfuscation.

Even leaving aside this total whitewash of Communist infiltration during the 1930s and 1940s, the measures imposed upon the supposed martyrs of that era utterly differ in degree from those visited upon today’s ideological dissenters. In the best-known cases, a few of Hollywood’s most highly-paid screenwriters saw their income dry up due to their Communist affiliations and were forced to cut back on their lavish lifestyles, a personal suffering treated with utmost sympathy in recent mainstream films produced by their spiritual descendants. Meanwhile, today’s targets of social wrath are almost always just working-stiffs, powerless nobodies fearfully voicing their controversial online opinions under a pseudonym before having their identities “doxxed” and then sometimes getting fired from their merely hum-drum jobs.

And even that gross disparity drastically understates the difference between then and now. During the 1950s, any proposal to ban suspected Communists from making telephone calls, watching television, renting cars, or having bank accounts surely would have been universally ridiculed as utter lunacy. But in today’s America, entirely equivalent measures are steadily growing more frequent and more severe, with very little public opposition.

Social media platforms have become the new electronic town square, and just a few weeks ago our own Israel Shamir’s recounted how he was “Banned by Facebook for Telling the Truth.” He described the absurd levels of censorship that he and so many others have suffered on that platform, sometimes even being punished with a lengthy ban merely for posting a link to his own writings.

I don’t much use Social Media myself since my long-form writings are hardly suitable for Facebook let alone the tiny character budget of Twitter. And although the latter seems effective as a means of promoting articles or distributing images or videos, the strict limits of a few dozen words surely render it much more appropriate for slogans or insults than anything more thoughtful or substantive. I find it difficult to believe that too many intelligent people have ever had their minds changed on anything significant by a few Tweets.

Amazon, however, is something else entirely. Its unmatched collection of available books comes close to fulfilling one of the original utopian goals of the very early days of the Computer Age. Over the last twenty years I’ve surely ordered many hundreds of volumes from that source, and reading them has played a huge role in transforming my beliefs on numerous important issues. For this reason, the growing wave of Amazon book-bannings carries very ominous overtones.

On February 19th, an article in Quartzdenounced Amazon for continuing to carry “neo-Nazi and White Supremacist” books, and the following week most of the books in question were suddenly “disappeared” after many years of availability, in some cases apparently even vanishing from personal Kindle devices. An article published in American Renaissance provided one of the earliest accounts, and Counter-Currentshas attempted to put together a comprehensive list of the dozens of vanished volumes.

The overwhelming majority of the banned works appear to be rightwing texts of a hortatory nature, generally falling under the rubric of White Nationalism or the Alt-Right. Glancing over the list, I found that I was only very slightly familiar with most of them, the most notable exception The Turner Diaries by William Pierce, which became something of a national best-seller in 1995 when the media claimed that it had served as the inspiration for the Oklahoma City Bombing. My own suspicion is that essays and articles of similar ideological sentiments exist in enormous numbers all across the Internet, and these possess vastly greater aggregate readership. It is not entirely clear what those pressuring Amazon had hoped to achieve by making those same ideas of white advocacy less available in concentrated book form. However, the almost unnoticed purge of various other Amazon books, of an entirely different nature, may have far greater negative ramifications.

The ADL ranks as one of our most formidable Jewish activist organizations, and according to media accounts it has been playing a central role in efforts to censor “hate speech” on leading Internet platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube. So it seems very likely to have also been behind Amazon’s recent purge, especially once we discover the nature of some of the more significant books now banned.

Such a role for the ADL is extremely unfortunate, given that organization’s long and very sordid history, which includes massive amounts of outright criminal activity, as I had discussed in a long article a few months ago. In fact, if not for the very widespread cowardice and dishonesty of our establishment media, the ADL would have long since lost all shreds of public credibility, and indeed most of its top leadership might well be serving long sentences in federal prison.

In recent years, almost no media mention of the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover fails to include condemnation of his sordid role in illegally recording Martin Luther King’s personal activities, and using that secret evidence in attempts at blackmail or intimidation, a devastating charge given King’s subsequent elevation to secular sainthood. However, none of these accounts ever reveal that it was actually ADL operatives who were spying on King and bugging his hotel rooms, then passing their tapes on to Hoover, who merely listened to them.

And that telling example of illegal 1960s ADL surveillance represents merely the smallest tip of the organization’s enormous domestic espionage activities, which have been directed against all individuals or organizations—left, right, or center—suspected of being insufficiently favorable toward Israel or Jews. By the time the FBI and local police departments broke a massive ADL spying operation in the early 1990s, the ADL was reported to be maintaining intelligence files on over one million Americans, a level of private domestic surveillance surely unequaled in our entire national history, with even some suggestions of possible involvement in political assassinations and terrorist attacks. But since the media quickly suppressed news of the scandal and the organization was punished merely with a slight slap on the wrist, there seems every likelihood ADL spying activities on ordinary Americans have actually metastasized since that point in time.

In effect, the ADL seems to function as a privatized version of our secret political police, seeking to maintain the power of the interlocking Jewish groups which dominate our society, much like the Stasi did on behalf of East Germany’s ruling Communist regime.

But for me, the most remarkable ADL revelation came in a book I purchased last year on Amazon, a book Amazon has now banned from sale. It seems that the ADL’s very origin story of one hundred years ago, frequently mentioned in my introductory history textbooks and which I had never previously questioned, actually represented an absolute inversion of historical reality. As I wrote:

Then perhaps a year or two ago, I happened to come across some discussion of the ADL’s 2013 centenary celebration, in which the leadership reaffirmed the principles of its 1913 founding. The initial impetus had been the vain national effort to save the life of Leo Frank, a young Southern Jew unjustly accused of murder and eventually lynched. Not long before, Frank’s name and story would have been equally vague in my mind, with the man half-remembered from my introductory history textbooks as one of the most notable early KKK victims in the fiercely anti-Semitic Deep South of the early twentieth century. However, not long before seeing that piece on the ADL I’d read Albert Lindemann’s highly-regarded study The Jew Accused, and his short chapter on the notorious Frank case had completely exploded all my preconceptions.

First, Lindemann demonstrated that there was no evidence of any anti-Semitism behind Frank’s arrest and conviction, with Jews constituting a highly-valued element of the affluent Atlanta society of the day, and no references to Frank’s Jewish background, negative or otherwise, appearing in the media prior to the trial. Indeed, five of the Grand Jurors who voted to indict Frank for murder were themselves Jewish, and none of them ever voiced regret over their decision. In general, support for Frank seems to have been strongest among Jews from New York and other distant parts of the country and weakest among the Atlanta Jews with best knowledge of the local situation.

Furthermore, although Lindemann followed the secondary sources he relied upon in declaring that Frank was clearly innocent of the charges of rape and murder, the facts he recounted led me to the opposite conclusion, seeming to suggest strong evidence of Frank’s guilt. When I much more recently read Lindemann’s longer and more comprehensive historical study of anti-Semitism, Esau’s Tears, I noticed that his abbreviated treatment of the Frank case no longer made any claim of innocence, perhaps indicating that the author himself might have also had second thoughts about the weight of the evidence.

Since I had had the impression that virtually all researchers who had investigated the Frank case had concluded that he was innocent of the rape and murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, I regarded my own contrary opinion as very tentative. But then someone pointed me to a 2016 book from an unexpected source that argued for Frank’s guilt. With some doubts, I clicked a couple of Amazon buttons and ordered the volume, written by the unnamed researchers of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam (NOI). As I explained at considerable length:

Anonymous works published by heavily-demonized religious-political movements naturally engender considerable caution, but once I began reading the 500 pages of The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man I was tremendously impressed by the quality of the historical analysis. I think I have only very rarely encountered a research monograph on a controversial historical event that provided such an enormous wealth of carefully-argued analysis backed by such copious evidence. The authors seemed to display complete mastery of the major secondary literature of the last one hundred years while drawing very heavily upon the various primary sources, including court records, personal correspondence, and contemporaneous publications, with the overwhelming majority of the 1200 footnotes referencing newspaper and magazine articles of that era. The case they made for Frank’s guilt seemed absolutely overwhelming.

The facts of the case against Frank eventually became a remarkable tangle of complex and often conflicting evidence and eyewitness testimony, with sworn statements regularly being retracted and then counter-retracted. But the crucial point that the NOI authors emphasize for properly deciphering this confusing situation is the enormous scale of the financial resources that were deployed on Frank’s behalf, both prior to the trial and afterward, with virtually all of the funds coming from Jewish sources. Currency conversions are hardly precise, but relative to the American family incomes of the time, the total expenditures by Frank supporters may have been as high as $25 million in present-day dollars, quite possibly more than any other homicide defense in American history before or after, and an almost unimaginable sum for the impoverished Deep South of that period. Years later, a leading donor privately admitted that much of this money was spent on perjury and similar falsifications, something which is very readily apparent to anyone who closely studies the case. When we consider this vast ocean of pro-Frank funding and the sordid means for which it was often deployed, the details of the case become far less mysterious. There exists a mountain of demonstrably fabricated evidence and false testimony in favor of Frank, and no sign of anything similar on the other side.

The police initially suspected the black night watchman who found the girl’s body, and he was quickly arrested and harshly interrogated. Soon afterward, a bloody shirt was found at his home, and Frank made several statements that seemed to implicate his employee in the crime. At one point, this black suspect may have come close to being summarily lynched by a mob, which would have closed the case. But he stuck to his story of innocence with remarkable composure, in sharp contrast to Frank’s extremely nervous and suspicious behavior, and the police soon shifted their scrutiny toward the latter, culminating in his arrest. All researchers now recognize that the night watchman was entirely innocent, and the material against him planted.

As the investigation moved forward, a major break occurred as a certain Jim Conley, Frank’s black janitor, came forward and confessed to having been Frank’s accomplice in concealing the crime. At the trial he testified that Frank had regularly enlisted him as a lookout during his numerous sexual liaisons with his female employees, and after murdering Phagan, had then offered him a huge sum of money to help remove and hide the body in the basement so that the crime could be pinned upon someone else. But with the legal noose tightening around Frank, Conley had begun to fear that he might be made the new scapegoat, and went to the authorities in order to save his own neck. Despite Conley’s damning accusations, Frank repeatedly refused to confront him in the presence of the police, which was widely seen as further proof of Frank’s guilt.

By the time of the trial itself, all sides were agreed that the murderer was either Frank, the wealthy Jewish businessman, or Conley, the semi-literate black janitor with a first-grade education and a long history of public drunkenness and petty crime. Frank’s lawyers exploited this comparison to the fullest, emphasizing Frank’s Jewish background as evidence for his innocence and indulging in the crudest sort of racial invective against his black accuser, whom they claimed was obviously the true rapist and murderer due to his bestial nature.

Taking a broader overview, the theory advanced by Frank’s legion of posthumous advocates seems to defy rationality. These journalists and scholars uniformly argue that Conley, a semi-literate black menial, had brutally raped and murdered a young white girl, and the legal authorities soon became aware of this fact, but conspired to set him free by supporting a complex and risky scheme to instead frame an innocent white businessman. Can we really believe that the police officials and prosecutors of a city in the Old South would have violated their oath of office in order to knowingly protect a black rapist and killer from legal punishment and thereby turn him loose upon their city streets, presumably to prey on future young white girls? This implausible reconstruction is particularly bizarre in that nearly all its advocates across the decades have been the staunchest of Jewish liberals, who endlessly condemned the horrific racism of the Southern authorities of that era, but then unaccountably chose to make a special exception in this one particular case.

The NOI authors devote nearly all of their lengthy book to a careful analysis of the Frank case provided in suitably dispassionate form, but a sense of their justifiable outrage does occasionally poke through. In the years prior to Frank’s killing, many thousands of black men throughout the South had been lynched, often based on a slender thread of suspicion, with few of these incidents receiving more than a few sentences of coverage in a local newspaper, and large numbers of whites had also perished in similar circumstances. Meanwhile, Frank had received benefit of the longest trial in modern Southern history, backed by the finest trial lawyers that money could buy, and based on overwhelming evidence had been sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young girl. But when Frank’s legal verdict was carried out by extra-judicial means, he immediately became the most famous lynching victim in American history, perhaps even attracting more media attention than all those thousands of other cases combined. Jewish money and Jewish media established him as a Jewish martyr who thereby effectively usurped the victimhood of the enormous number of innocent blacks who were killed both before and after him, none of whom were ever even recognized as individuals.

The NOI authors note that prior to Frank’s trial American history had been virtually devoid of any evidence of significant anti-Semitism, with the previous most notable incident being the case of an extremely wealthy Jewish financier who was refused service at a fancy resort hotel. But by totally distorting the Frank case and focusing such massive national media coverage on his plight, Jewish leaders around the country succeeded in fabricating a powerful ideological narrative despite its lack of reality, perhaps intending the story to serve as a bonding experience to foster Jewish community cohesion.

Let us summarize what seems to be the solidly established factual history of the Frank case, quite different than the traditional narrative. There is not the slightest evidence that Frank’s Jewish background was a factor behind his arrest and conviction, nor the death sentence he received. The case set a remarkable precedent in Southern courtroom history with the testimony of a black man playing a central role in a white man’s conviction. From the earliest stages of the murder investigation, Frank and his allies continually attempted to implicate a series of different innocent blacks by planting false evidence and using bribes to solicit perjured testimony, while the exceptionally harsh racial rhetoric that Frank and his attorneys directed towards those blacks was presumably intended to provoke their public lynching. Yet despite all these attempts by the Frank forces to play upon the notorious racial sentiments of the white Southerners of that era, the latter saw through these schemes and Frank was the one sentenced to hang for his rape and murder of that young girl.

Now suppose that all the facts of this famous case were exactly unchanged except that Frank had been a white Gentile. Surely the trial would be ranked as one of the greatest racial turning points in American history, perhaps even overshadowing Brown v. Boardbecause of the extent of popular sentiment, and it would have been given a central place in all our modern textbooks. Meanwhile, Frank, his lawyers, and his heavy financial backers would probably be cast as among the vilest racial villains in all of American history for their repeated attempts to foment the lynching of various innocent blacks so that a wealthy white rapist and murderer could walk free. But because Frank was Jewish rather than Christian, this remarkable history has been completely inverted for over one hundred years by our Jewish-dominated media and historiography.

Prior to the creation of the Internet and the establishment of Amazon’s book-selling operation, this fascinating history would have remained completely unknown to me. Given its influential political role in our society, the ADL must certainly be concerned if it became widely known that the organization was founded with the central mission of ensuring that no wealthy and powerful Jew ever suffered punishment for the rape and murder of a young Christian girl, nor for trying to orchestrate the lynching of innocent black men in order to cover his own guilt.

When I published my original article in October, I naturally encouraged readers to order the remarkable book in question and decide for themselves. But Amazon has now chosen to ban that book of outstanding black historical scholarship at the height of Black History Month, a step taken just a few days after the ADL President made his annual glowing tribute to that national celebration of black pride. Those interested can still read my lengthy analysis of that book and the important historical event it describes.

The true circumstances surrounding the establishment of the ADL is not the only work of serious historical scholarship to have suddenly been removed from Amazon’s shelves, and most of the others seem to follow a very consistent pattern, certainly suggesting the hand of that organization and its kindred spirits.

For more than a half-century, Jewish political activists and engaged academics have pilloried white American society for its longstanding mistreatment of blacks, especially focusing upon the “original sin” of black slavery, and almost every morning my New York Timescarries one or more articles filled with such denunciations. Americans of Anglo-Saxon founding stock are invariably portrayed as the villains of the story, with American Jews frequently cited as among the heroic supporters of the Civil Rights Movement that eventually rectified some of those injustices.

Yet just as in the case of Leo Frank, the true facts may be somewhat more complex. Over a quarter-century ago, the same group of provocative NOI researchers published a fascinating volume gathering together a huge quantity of historical evidence suggesting that prior to the Civil War, America’s tiny Jewish population had actually played an enormously disproportionate role in establishing and promoting black slavery, with their co-ethnics even sometimes outright dominating that institution in the vast and exceptionally cruel slave plantations of Latin America, which were frequently operated like death-camps. These claims are hardly so implausible given that slave-trading had been a very traditional Jewish occupation in much of Europe and the Middle East for the last thousand years, and it is probably more than coincidence that the largest centers of Jewish settlement in Colonial America tended to be those cities focused on the slave trade.

I am hardly a specialist in pre-Civil War history, and weighing the strength of the evidence presented is beyond my expertise. But I did also order and read an angry rebuttal book published a couple of years later by a Dr. Harold Brackman, a Jewish historian working in conjunction with the auspices of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and found his arguments quite thin and unpersuasive.

Under normal circumstances, scholars of varied opinions would debate this controversial thesis back and forth and eventually come to some conclusion. But when Tony Martin, a prominent black scholar at Wellesley, merely put the provocative book on the reading list of one of his black history courses, he was ferociously vilified in the media and saw his career ruined, with concerted efforts made to fire him despite his tenured position. He later recounted the situation he faced in a short book.

I briefly mentioned the study and its thesis in a July article and suggested those intrigued by the dispute order it from Amazon and evaluate the evidence for themselves. Alas, that is no longer possible since Amazon has now banned the work, although all the subsequent books rebutting the thesis or discussing the huge controversy it aroused are still freely available. This strongly suggests that the evidence presented of a massive Jewish role in black slavery was simply too compelling to be easily refuted.

These anonymous black research studies prepared under the auspices of the Nation of Islam are hardly alone among serious historical texts now banned by Amazon. Indeed, groundbreaking works by eminent Jewish scholars may now also suffer a similar fate if they stray into forbidden territory. As I wrote at length last year:

I do not doubt that much of the candid analysis provided above will be quite distressing to many individuals. Indeed, some may believe that such material far exceeds the boundaries of mere “anti-Semitism” and easily crosses the threshold into constituting an actual “blood libel” against the Jewish people. That extremely harsh accusation, widely used by stalwart defenders of Israeli behavior, refers to the notorious Christian superstition, prevalent throughout most of the Middle Ages and even into more modern times, that Jews sometimes kidnapped small Christian children in order to drain their blood for use in various magic rituals, especially in connection with the Purim religious holiday. One of my more shocking discoveries of the last dozen years is that there is a fairly strong likelihood that these seemingly impossible beliefs were actually true.

I personally have no professional expertise whatsoever in Jewish ritual traditions, nor the practices of Medieval Jewry. But one of the world’s foremost scholars in that field is Ariel Toaff, professor of Jewish Renaissance and Medieval Studies at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, and himself the son of the Chief Rabbi of Rome.

In 2007, he published the Italian edition of his academic study Blood Passovers, based on many years of diligent research, assisted by his graduate students and guided by the suggestions of his various academic colleagues, with the initial print run of 1,000 copies selling out on the first day. Given Toaff’s international eminence and such enormous interest, further international distribution, including an English edition by a prestigious American academic press would normally have followed. But the ADL and various other Jewish-activist groups regarded such a possibility with extreme disfavor, and although these activists lacked any scholarly credentials, they apparently applied sufficient pressure to cancel all additional publication. Although Prof. Toaff initially attempted to stand his ground in stubborn fashion, he soon took the same course as Galileo, and his apologies naturally became the basis of the always-unreliable Wikipedia entry on the topic.

It appears that a considerable number of Ashkenazi Jews traditionally regarded Christian blood as having powerful magical properties and considered it a very valuable component of certain important ritual observances at particular religious holidays. Obviously, obtaining such blood in large amounts was fraught with considerable risk, which greatly enhanced its monetary value, and the trade in the vials of this commodity seems to have been widely practiced.

Obviously, the ritual murder of Christian children for their blood was viewed with enormous disfavor by the local Gentile population, and the widespread belief in its existence remained a source of bitter tension between the two communities, flaring up occasionally when a Christian child mysteriously disappeared at a particular time of year, or when a body was found that exhibited suspicious types of wounds or showed a strange loss of blood. Every now and then, a particular case would reach public prominence, often leading to a political test of strength between Jewish and anti-Jewish groups. During the mid-19th century, there was one such famous case in French-dominated Syria, and just before the outbreak of the First World War, Russia was wracked by a similar political conflict in the 1913 Beilis Affair in the Ukraine.

I first encountered these very surprising ideas almost a dozen years ago in a long article by Israel Shamir that was referenced in Counterpunch, and this would definitely be worth reading as an overall summary, together with a couple of his follow-up columns, while writer Andrew Hamilton offers the most recent 2012 overview of the controversy. Shamir also helpfully provides a free copy of the book in PDF form, an updated version with the footnotes properly noted in the text. Anyway, I lack the expertise to effectively judge the likelihood of the Toaff Hypothesis, so I would invite those interested to read Toaff’s book or better yet the related articles and decide for themselves.

Amazon has now banned the English translation of Prof. Toaff’s astonishing book, though it is still available on the Internet in PDF form at the link provided above.

All of these almost unprecedented Amazon book bannings occurred just in the last couple of weeks, and unless they are soon reversed, they will surely become just the first of many. The 1990s volumes on Judaism written by the late Israel Shahak, an award-winning professor at Hebrew University in Israel, will surely also be headed for oblivion. As I wrote last year:

Although Shahak’s books are quite short, they contain such a density of astonishing material, it would take many, many thousands of words to begin to summarize them. Essentially almost everything I had known—or thought I had known—about the religion of Judaism, at least in its zealously Orthodox traditional form, was utterly wrong.

On the most basic level, the religion of most traditional Jews is actually not at all monotheistic, but instead contains a wide variety of different male and female gods, having quite complex relations to each other, with these entities and their properties varying enormously among the numerous different Jewish sub-sects, depending upon which portions of the Talmud and the Kabala they place uppermost. For example, the traditional Jewish religious cry “The Lord Is One” has always been interpreted by most people to be an monotheistic affirmation, and indeed, many Jews take exactly this same view. But large numbers of other Jews believe this declaration instead refers to achievement of sexual union between the primary male and female divine entities. And most bizarrely, Jews having such radically different views see absolutely no difficulty in praying side by side, and merely interpreting their identical chants in very different fashion.

Furthermore, religious Jews apparently pray to Satan almost as readily as they pray to God, and depending upon the various rabbinical schools, the particular rituals and sacrifices they practice may be aimed at enlisting the support of the one or the other. Once again, so long as the rituals are properly followed, the Satan-worshippers and the God-worshippers get along perfectly well and consider each other equally pious Jews, merely of a slightly different tradition. One point that Shahak repeatedly emphasizes is that in traditional Judaism the nature of the ritual itself is absolutely uppermost, while the interpretation of the ritual is rather secondary. So perhaps a Jew who washes his hands three times clockwise might be horrified by another who follows a counter-clockwise direction, but whether the hand-washing were meant to honor God or to honor Satan would be hardly be a matter of much consequence.

If these ritualistic issues constituted the central features of traditional religious Judaism, we might regard it as a rather colorful and eccentric survival of ancient times. But unfortunately, there is also a far darker side, primarily involving the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, with the highly derogatory term goyim frequently used to describe the latter. To put it bluntly, Jews have divine souls and goyim do not, being merely beasts in the shape of men. Indeed, the primary reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve as the slaves of Jews, with some very high-ranking rabbis occasionally stating this well-known fact. In 2010, Israel’s top Sephardic rabbi used his weekly sermon to declare that the only reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve Jews and do work for them. The enslavement or extermination of all non-Jews seems an ultimate implied goal of the religion.

Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications. For example, in a published article a prominent Israeli rabbi explained that if a Jew needed a liver, it would be perfectly fine, and indeed obligatory, to kill an innocent Gentile and take his. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that today Israel is widely regarded as one of the world centers of organ-trafficking.

As a further illustration of the seething hatred traditional Judaism radiates towards all those of a different background, saving the life of a non-Jew is generally considered improper or even prohibited, and taking any such action on the Sabbath would be an absolute violation of religious edict. Such dogmas are certainly ironic given the widespread presence of Jews in the medical profession during recent centuries, but they came to the fore in Israel when a religiously-minded military doctor took them to heart and his position was supported by the country’s highest religious authorities.

And while religious Judaism has a decidedly negative view towards all non-Jews, Christianity in particular is regarded as a total abomination, which must be wiped from the face of the earth.

Whereas pious Muslims consider Jesus as the holy prophet of God and Muhammed’s immediate predecessor, according to the Jewish Talmud, Jesus is perhaps the vilest being who ever lived, condemned to spend eternity in the bottommost pit of Hell, immersed in a boiling vat of excrement. Religious Jews regard the Muslim Quran as just another book, though a totally mistaken one, but the Christian Bible represents purest evil, and if circumstances permit, burning Bibles is a very praiseworthy act. Pious Jews are also enjoined to always spit three times at any cross or church they encounter, and direct a curse at all Christian cemeteries. Indeed, many deeply religious Jews utter a prayer each and every day for the immediate extermination of all Christians.

Over the years prominent Israeli rabbis have sometimes publicly debated whether Jewish power has now become sufficiently great that all the Christian churches of Jerusalem, Bethleham, and other nearby areas can finally be destroyed, and the entire Holy Land completely cleansed of all traces of its Christian contamination. Some have taken this position, but most have urged prudence, arguing that Jews needed to gain some additional strength before they should take such a risky step. These days, many tens of millions of zealous Christians and especially Christian Zionists are enthusiastic advocates for Jews, Judaism, and Israel, and I strongly suspect that at least some of that enthusiasm is based upon ignorance.

Shahak’s scholarly research received glowing praise from some of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, including Christopher Hitchens, Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, and Edward Said, as well as prestigious publications such as The London Review of Books and Middle East International. But given the political implications of his revelations, I suspect they will soon only be available on scattered websitesacross the Internet.

A more detailed discussion of the works of Profs. Toaff and Shahak on these lesser-known aspects of the Jewish religion can be found in my long article from last July:

Other Amazon books seem to have recently fallen into limbo, still being sold by that website, but hidden away so that most readers would never discover them.

More than thirty-five years ago, Lenni Brenner, a Jewish leftist of anti-Zionist sympathies, published his ground-breaking research revealing the extensive Nazi-Zionist economic partnership of the 1930s, which laid the basis for the creation of the State of Israel. Although our media has almost entirely ignored that fascinating history, subsequent studies have fully confirmed Brenner’s central framework.

I myself only became aware of Brenner’s book last year and immediately purchased it on Amazon, then published an article in which I discussed his important findings:

Although the Germans paid little attention to the entreaties of that minor organization, the far larger and more influential mainstream Zionist movement of Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion was something else entirely. And during most of the 1930s, these other Zionists had formed an important economic partnership with Nazi Germany, based upon an obvious commonality of interests. After all, Hitler regarded Germany’s one percent Jewish population as a disruptive and potentially dangerous element which he wanted gone, and the Middle East seemed as good a destination for them as any other. Meanwhile, the Zionists had very similar objectives, and the creation of their new national homeland in Palestine obviously required both Jewish immigrants and Jewish financial investment.

The importance of the Nazi-Zionist pact for Israel’s establishment is difficult to overstate. According to a 1974 analysis in Jewish Frontiercited by Brenner, between 1933 and 1939 over 60% of all the investment in Jewish Palestine came from Nazi Germany. The worldwide impoverishment of the Great Depression had drastically reduced ongoing Jewish financial support from all other sources, and Brenner reasonably suggests that without Hitler’s financial backing, the nascent Jewish colony, so tiny and fragile, might easily have shriveled up and died during that difficult period.

Such a conclusion leads to fascinating hypotheticals. When I first stumbled across references to the Ha’avara Agreement on websites here and there, one of the commenters mentioning the issue half-jokingly suggested that if Hitler had won the war, statues would surely have been built to him throughout Israel and he would today be recognized by Jews everywhere as the heroic Gentile leader who had played the central role in reestablishing a national homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine after almost 2000 years of bitter exile.

This sort of astonishing counter-factual possibility is not nearly as totally absurd as it might sound to our present-day ears. We must recognize that our historical understanding of reality is shaped by the media, and media organs are controlled by the winners of major wars and their allies, with inconvenient details often excluded to avoid confusing the public.

Once Hitler consolidated power in Germany, he quickly outlawed all other political organizations for the German people, with only the Nazi Party and Nazi political symbols being legally permitted. But a special exception was made for German Jews, and Germany’s local Zionist Party was accorded complete legal status, with Zionist marches, Zionist uniforms, and Zionist flags all fully permitted. Under Hitler, there was strict censorship of all German publications, but the weekly Zionist newspaper was freely sold at all newsstands and street corners. The clear notion seemed to be that a German National Socialist Party was the proper political home for the country’s 99% German majority, while Zionist National Socialism would fill the same role for the tiny Jewish minority.

In 1934, Zionist leaders invited an important SS official to spend six months visiting the Jewish settlement in Palestine, and upon his return, his very favorable impressions of the growing Zionist enterprise were published as a massive 12-part-series in Joseph Goebbel’s Der Angriff, the flagship media organ of the Nazi Party, bearing the descriptive title “A Nazi Goes to Palestine.”

Just last year, the Brenner books I purchased immediately popped up on the Amazon website, but these days they are hidden away, not even appearing on his nearly empty author page. One suspects that the ADL or similar organizations are very reluctant to have readers discover Brenner’s extensive collection of primary source documents or the paperback edition of his historical narrative, whose cover shows the commemorative medal struck by Nazi Germany to mark its Zionist alliance, displaying the Swastika on one side and the Jewish Star-of-David on the other. Those interested in the entire complex and rather surprising historical relationship between Jews and the Third Reich during its dozen years of existence should consider reading my article on the subject.

Jews today constitute less than 1% of the combined population of North America and the European Union, yet any honest observer would have to admit that organized Jewish groups totally dominate the politics and public life of these once-proud nations, which during past centuries had ruled most of the world.

The primary factor behind this astonishing control now exercised over populations that are 99% non-Jewish is probably the powerful leverage Jews today hold over money and media. But an important secondary factor has been the gradual elevation of the Jewish Holocaust of World War II into the status of a near-sacred doctrine, largely replacing traditional Christianity as an official state religion, with dissenters generally treated as heretics and frequently subjected to government prosecution or imprisonment. Indeed, it seems that virtually every morning my newspapers are filled with Holocaust articles, most of them written with the same sort of sacred reverence that Catholic newspapers a century ago might have given to discussions of the Virgin Birth. However, because this so-called “Holocaustianity” purports to be a secular faith, it remains vulnerable to dispute on factual grounds, and many have suggested that its collapse would strike a mortal blow against reigning Jewish power.

The ADL and other Jewish activist organizations certainly seem extremely reluctant to take that risk. We should hardly be surprised that the first great large wave of Amazon book-bannings was the early 2017 purge of many dozens of scholarly texts by revisionist historians who had argued at great length and in considerable detail that the Holocaust was largely a hoax, concocted by Jewish activists and Hollywood filmmakers as a powerful shield against any criticism of Jewish or Israeli misbehavior. Although many of these books are still available for sale by their publisher, their complete disappearance from Amazon has greatly reduced their potential distribution.

Fortunately, I had purchased copies of several such books while Amazon still stocked them, and last year I published a long article summarizing my own conclusions about that complex and highly contentious topic. Although I am hardly an expert, it seemed to me that there was an enormous amount of persuasive evidence that the Holocaust is indeed substantially fraudulent, and quite possibly, almost entirely so. Those interested in considering my reasoning are welcome to do so and decide for themselves.

Probably the most famous dystopian novel of the last one hundred years is George Orwell’s 1984, and perhaps its most memorable observation is that those who control the past control the future and those who control the present control the past. And we should recognize that serious books constitute the congealed nature of that past.

Our electronic media and its new social offshoot may dominate the thoughts of our population, and perhaps a single Tweet by a third-tier political celebrity might attract more readers in an hour than all the books discussed in this article have drawn in a year. But while effervescent, such electronic media emanations are transitory and fleeting, and quite likely to be forgotten an hour later. Meanwhile, serious books of ideas and scholarship have the potential to permanently reshape the contours of reality accepted by the sort of individuals who may eventually alter our society. During a heated national election campaign, billions of dollars may be expended to temporarily shift public opinion on some issue or candidate, but a few weeks later, the effect has usually dissipated. Books may cost just a few dollars, but their potential impact is of a different order of weight and permanency.

Amazon today possesses a near-total monopoly over Internet book sales, and if American society continues to allow it to ban serious works of scholarship on political or ideological grounds, our future intellectual freedom has already been lost.

NOVANEWS

On February 19, 2019, the leftist website Quartz featured a blog entry alerting its readers that Amazon was selling books too controversial for zealots of political correctness to tolerate. The article was adorned with a burning swastika to give the reader the impression that the primary target of this call for censorship were some truly evil people.

After all, we all need to fret at all times that these evil Nazis are always waiting for the next opportunity to throw people alive into gas ovens. And who wouldn’t agree that such creatures really need to be censored…

The image Quartz used to terrify its readers …

In case you haven’t picked up on my sarcasm here, it may be time for you to relinquish your voting rights, because you are evidently unfit to think rationally and to recognize a bogeyman when he’s driven through cyber-town.

The traditional enemies of free speech have been trying for years to bully Amazon into banning items that are perfectly legal (1), at least in marketplaces such as the United States, where the First Amendment to its Constitution prevents the government from passing laws limiting free speech. Amazon simply used to ignore them. And why shouldn’t they? Who is going to boycott Amazon for selling a few copies of some fringe literature?

In 1998, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, gave a speech at Lake Forest College in Lake Forest, Illinois, where he explained the background of his company’s success story, and simply stated in this regard:

“[…] we’re taking a different approach. We’re trying to sell all books. We want to make every book available. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” (starting at 14:30)

But in early 2017, this all changed when Amazon turned its free marketplace of ideas into an increasingly controlled market where the standards of political correctness reign supreme. This is not trivial, because Amazon controls some 50% of all book sales in the U.S., and their market share for other consumer products is similar and growing. Many consumers rely on Amazon as a product search engine. If Amazon doesn’t carry it, chances are that some 50% of all consumers will never even learn about a product’s existence. If Amazon decides to flip the switch on a certain company, chances are that vendor will not survive this instantaneous loss of some 50% of their turnover. The power we, as consumers, bestow on Amazon to decide what we can and cannot buy is becoming truly frightening.

In March of 2017, Amazon flipped the switch on one small British publishing company: Castle Hill Publishers. Almost all their book titles were banned overnight, with no warning. What kind of books are these? Raving rants of racism and anti-Semitism? Not at all. Here are 9 of them, with blurbs describing what they are about. For a full list of the 68 banned books, see here.

In the eye of this censorship storm was actually a series of academic books dealing with the fate of the Jews in Europe prior to and during World War II. Ah, you may say, that’s a fine way of avoiding the third-rail term “Holocaust.” As a matter of fact, while many of the books deal indeed with this topic, some of them don’t, or do so only indirectly. But no matter what, they were all murdered by Amazon: “No academic dissent permitted!”

Castle Hill Publishers has described in detail in a separate book titled The Day Amazon Murdered History how and why this massive book banning unfolded. For now, this book can even be bought from Amazon. But you don’t have to buy it to read it, because it’s available as a free download from the publishers’ web shop. If you prefer watching it as a documentary instead, visit the publishers’ YouTube Channel. But beware! The “YouTube community” has flagged this documentary on book banning “as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences,” so you have to first confirm that you really want to be in shock and awe when learning about this. This flagging prevents this video from ever showing up in any YouTube or Google searches, and people cannot embed it either. (Needless to say, the publishers’ own web version comes without these restrictions.)

So, not only is censorship alive and well in the U.S. – on a corporate level – but the powers that be moreover keep this ugly fact as invisible as possible from the public’s eyes by hiding it from the accidental observer. You need to already know that it’s there in order to find it!